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“It’s been a long four years of practising and training and time away. And now it’s time to maybe take a break and spend some time as a family,” says Jones, who has a 15-month-old daughter with her partner, curler Brent Laing.

The time spent practising and training paid off on Feb. 21, when Jones — together with her lead Dawn McEwen, second Jill Officer and third Kaitlyn Lawes — downed Sweden 6-3 in the gold medal game. Throwing the last rock in that game is a moment Jones says she’ll never forget.

“I looked around at my family and I looked around at all the sacrifices everybody had made and, yeah, we were going to be standing on top of that podium, winning that gold medal,” she says.

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“It’s a dream you’ve had for your entire life and it was about to come true. That 12 seconds seemed like the longest 12 seconds of my life. I can feel exactly what I was feeling in that moment because it was like it was in slow motion.”

It was a moment Canadians wanted to celebrate with the team, tweeting their support and congratulations.

“There were so many tweets during and immediately after the gold medal game that, by the time I turned on my phone, they wouldn’t load because there were so many of them,” Jones says. “I still haven’t received any tweets from about an hour before the game, during the game and about an hour after the game. To me, that’s just mind-boggling.”

The new-found attention extends from the digital realm into the real world, too.

“Everywhere we go we’re recognized,” Jones says. “It’s all great stuff, to have people recognize our team and recognize curling and help increase the popularity of curling is amazing.”

The huge success of both Canadian teams in Sochi has turned Jones and her fellow elite curlers into ambassadors for the sport, and it’s a role the skip relishes.

“Curling brings us such great joy that you want everybody to know how wonderful it is. You want it to grow, you want it to continue, you want to have a legacy that the sport you love will continue forever,” Jones says, adding that she’s seeing more and more young people picking up rocks and brooms and giving curling a try.

Jones and her team are taking March off from competing to bask in their win.

“It’s something we’ve waited a lifetime for and so many times we’ve failed, then finally it works, so you don’t want to let one moment pass you by right now,” she says.

They have one more competition to play in April and then, well, the future gets fuzzy.

“We haven’t talked about (what happens next). We always said that we wanted to live in the moment because so many people are focused on the future and we didn’t want the moment to pass us by,” Jones says.

“I can’t imagine playing with anybody else and I can’t imagine walking away from the game right now. I’m just loving every single minute of it. But we’ll see what everybody wants to do.”

For now, Jones is just looking forward to a break from training. She and her teammates have some speaking engagements and appearances lined up, including presenting at the Junos on March 30.

“Then probably just back to work and back to normal life,” says Jones, who’s scheduled to return to her day job as a lawyer for National Bank Financial in May.

But the gold medalist is also looking forward to spending a lot of time with her biggest fan, daughter Isabella, who stayed with family in Ontario while Jones was in Sochi.

Despite the distance, Jones says her daughter was still a huge part of her Olympic experience.

“She inspired me to make sure that I enjoyed every second of the Olympics because if I was going to be away from her, I wanted it to be for a great reason,” Jones says. “I want her to know that the Olympics was the experience of a lifetime for me.”

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